Elevator Of Death: Woman Rode Into High-Rise Fire

MSNBC.COM - A high-rise fire killed a woman early Sunday who reportedly moved to Chicago less than a year ago.

Shantel McCoy, 32, who lived on the 12th floor of the building at
3130 N. Lake Shore Drive, apparently got on the elevator with a bag of
takeout food to go home, not knowing a fire was raging above her.

The fire broke out on the 12th floor of a building at around 2 a.m.,
said Chicago Fire Department Chief Joe Roccasalva. The fire also injured
nine other people, including two firefighters.

"When the first companies arrived on the scene, they had fire blowing out of the 12th floor window," Roccasalva said.

The fire started in an occupied apartment on the 12th floor,
Roccasalva said. A man and woman who live there were able to make it out
with their dog, but they left their front door open, Roccasalva said.
Had they closed it, according to the chief, McCoy might have survived.

"If the fire is in your apartment, we tell people to get out and
close the door. Each unit is a compartment to itself," he said. "It has
rated fire walls that abut each other, and into the hallway, and a rated
fire door. Usually, it's a 90 minute door. So that would have held back
the heat and a lot of the smoke until we got up there."

"The door to the apartment where the fire started was not closed, and
the super-heated toxic gasses all got into the hallway there,"
Roccasalva said. "The heat in there is probably 1,500 to 2,000 degrees
at the ceiling. And if she was standing in the elevator, she probably
got it full, right on."

The residential high-rise building was built before 1975. It does not
have a connected system of fire alarms and no sprinklers except in the
garage, the fire captain said. That means when one smoke alarm goes off,
others in the building will not necessarily do so.

The building was not yet required to update its fire alarm system,
Roccasalva said. An ordinance was passed that required older high-rises
to be retrofitted with a modern, connected system by this month.
However, a Building Department spokesperson told the Tribune that the
City Council recently put off that deadline until 2015.

People who live above and below the 12th floor confirmed that they did not hear fire alarms going off.

McCoy's mother told the Tribune she moved to Chicago last March after being laid off from a job in Philadelphia.

Nine other people were hurt, including two firefighters. One of the
victims was critically injured. Of the firefighters, one had minor
injuries to his arm. The other firefighter was in serious condition with
exhaustion.

Roccasalva said that because the elevators would not all return to
the lobby when crews arrived, firefighters had to lug their equipment up
12 flights of stairs to attack the fire.

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